As an overseas voter I need to fill out the Federal Post Card Application Form and send it to my county clerk. I need to have it notarized. In order to notarize it I need to print it out and take it to a notary. The problem, however, is that this document, as served from the michigan.gov website, is password protected. This prevents me from saving or printing it. Aside from seeming like a sick joke, it posed a technical problem that I hadn't ever needed to solve. Google came to the rescue and I found a PDF Password Remover program which did the job nicely.
Microsoft recently delivered a crippled and crippling operating system called Vista. Peter Gutmann predicts Apple will try to sell us the same crap in OS X in the future. I don't want any of it.
So, when thinking about this issue, we have to ask ourselves: is a company like Microsoft or Apple likely to tell Hollywood to jump off a cliff? No, because both companies know that users will want to play HD DVD or Blu-ray discs on their computers.
Wrong. I value my computing environment more than that. If Apple builds these measures into it's OS, I will not use it. Ubuntu is a perfectly acceptable alternative.
